First off, I know this is something to talk with a lawyer, but I am a single developer, and would like to know more about how it works (particulary, in USA and Germany)<p>I was going through patents.google.com looking for patents to an idea that I would like to work on and to see if there already is one or not. However, it is very disheartening. Say for this particular example of a case.<p>I want to make a screencasting application in the web browser using the webRTC API. Now, without going through the patent, I could hack a product that does some business functions. Some of these implementation would be quite general, which I imagine, most developers would be able to implement on their own. However, these solutions would be quite similar (not on exact implementation detail, but rather on process). So as far I as got it, this patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140281896A1/en?q=webrtc&assignee=Google+Inc. claims such a process even specifying WebRTC.<p>Another case, would be if I want to use computer vision to detect faces from websites. But this patent seem to claim the idea of it : https://patents.google.com/patent/US9215411B2/en?q=webrtc&assignee=Google+Inc. Like for example
1. The method of claim 6, further comprising:
detecting a face; and
one or more of panning and zooming into the face.<p>It basically claims for detecting a face. If i implement such things using openCV, would that be patent liability?<p>How are such things handled in general? How can one pursue any innovation based on such restrictions? Or it doesn't matter in the sense they are not able to do?<p>tldr; For example, how can piwik do a analytics service when there are other patents that cover the process of implementing such service? How can you build a competitive product?